Horror warning. Brace yourself :
Many of these babies were burned to provide heat for hospitals.
Yes these were aborted babies.
The world says:
When babies are called ‘fetuses’ it’s ok to murder them & treat them like a removed appendix or nail clippings – just don’t burn them – then the headlines will say ‘babies burnt’!
The number above ignores the millions of aborted babies worldwide (incredibly almost 60 000 000 in America) – but these 15 000 souls make a point in a way some of the world may hear.
“Come on, lefties. Just think of the carbon emissions from all of those incinerated aborted babies,” said the National Review’s Jim Geraghty.
Judgement is coming friends. Know it.
Listen to the audio below, or download it here.
Listen to full audio here.
AlbertMohler.com – The Briefing 03-25-14
Society Stacktrace 
Burning human remains is the most hygienic way to get rid of them, there is nothing sacrificial about it. Not only aborted fetuses are burned, but also the remnants of miscarriages, and other removed tissue like tumors and amputated limbs. It’s all dead organic material, in the end.
(Though I think in some hospitals it is possible to save the remnants of a miscarriage for a private cremation, if you would want this.)
Also, you know my opinion on abortion, I have nothing against it in the early stages of pregnancy. A heap of cells is not a child, period.
What is your opinion on infanticide? …i.e. a bigger bunch of cells?
How do you prevent being arbitrary on this?
I don’t know enough about the development of a fetus in the womb to be able to give you any exact data, but to me it depends mostly on the development of the brain. In the end, the ability to think is what makes a human human. Very late term abortions are indeed somewhat questionable.
I think an abortion should have a good reason. There are many cases in which it’s practically merciful for the child not to let it be born. Take a severely handicapped child by example, or one that will suffer from a horrible hereditary disease. Or an accidental pregnancy in a teenager, who is neither mentally nor physically capable of properly raising that child. Or rape resulting in pregnancy. Or people who are financially in so bad a situation they could never support the child, nor pay for the medical care needed during pregnancy. Or people who are mentally incapable of raising a child or even making it through the pregnancy, by example a psychotic woman who got knocked up because she was too out of it to realize what she was doing. (I have been in a madhouse, I have heard and seen enough things like that.) Or people for whom a pregnancy is physically so dangerous they might not survive it.
My point is this: abortion is not about being against families, encouraging promiscuity, hating children, or anything of the like. It’s about choice, and being reasonable. If you think you do much good for “families” by making abortion illegal, you’re wrong. Ask any neglected, abused, unwanted child whether it would have rather not been born, and I assure you, you would get some heartbreaking answers.
If pro life people really cared about families, they would urge for proper sexual education and readily available contraception. I’m sure that would already cause a large drop in the number of abortions…
I’ve listened to a woman interviewed – the ‘product’ of rape. She was indeed happy to be alive – profoundly so.
You argue long about reasons & your thought-warrants-life logic is also problematic since foetal pain is not compelling to the pro-death/choice camp. This gets to the euthanasia topic – recently legalized for children in Belgium … long reasoning there also, and open to inevitable “reasoning evolution”.
“…on the BBC’s Today programme, Professor Anand said: ‘After 20 weeks of gestation it is very likely that the foetus will feel the kind of pain that occurs from the crushing of body parts or dismemberment or other invasive procedures that occur during foetal surgery or abortion.”
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-510975/Abortion-time-limit-reduced-foetuses-feel-pain-24-weeks-MPs-told.html
I’m against euthanasia for children when for psychological suffering. Children (especially teenagers) have no idea about scale and perspective when it comes to their emotions, there is never a logical ground to call their pain “insufferable”. Physical suffering, on the other hand… I believe there are cases when being allowed to die is a gift, even for a small child.
The euthanasia debate in Belgium annoys me sometimes, especially because people from abroad often think we have some evil plan to just kill sick children off instead of caring for them. This is NOT the case. In most cases terminally ill children are simply palliatively sedated and allowed to die at their own pace. There are cases (not many, note that) when an extremely painful condition does not lead to death in itself. (I think by example of a small child who suffered from a hereditary disease that made it’s skin form boils as if burned, when touched by anything. Extremely painful, not lethal.) It’s for those cases that euthanasia is an option; not a protocol, not the go-to strategy, simply a possibility when the suffering is too great.
As for fetal pain… most somewhat developed organisms are capable of feeling pain, that doesn’t mean that they are thinking and feeling in the same was as we do. Pain is an evolutionary mechanism, one of the oldest tricks in the book of survival; it make sense for this to develop early. Pets feel pain too when they get put down, but that’s not a debate people are having… (I’m not saying that a fetus is like a pet, just that it is probably less intelligent and conscious.)
As I said before, I consider late term abortions questionable, because the more developed a fetus is, the more it counts as “human” in my book. But abortion has to be an option.
As for the woman whose testimony you heard; she probably didn’t grow up feeling hated and disgusting. Her mother probably had a solid support system, a good family, and decent psychological aid to help her through it. I never said that a product of rape could not make for a happy child… but it’s harder, and not everyone has the ability to get over trauma like that.
Wow, some parts of the reply could / would be classified as ‘sick’ by someone less willing to view the world from your perspective. “…when being allowed to die is a gift…”, “…allowed to die at their own pace…”. Reminds me of the hypocritical oath.
Pain – evolutionary worldview, yes. The reply up to & including this makes me think of the article I’ll post a link to next.
The rape-child-now-happy-adult, agreed – except the psychological help topic. Don’t believe it’s necessary or helpful if you have love in your life – being loved & convinced about PURPOSE other than “dancing to your DNA”.
Just to comment on what you said about psychological help, I strongly disagree here. Rape is one of the worst traumas one can experience, it often gives rise to PTSD similar to what war veterans experience. Even when a person has rationally come to terms with what has happened, the anxiety, panic attacks, derealization, anti-social behavior, etc… stay, because in essence it’s a biological thing. No matter how many loving friends and relatives you have, it doesn’t simply go away without help, no more than an appendicitis goes away by itself. Having love in your life is crucial to healing, that’s true, but by itself it’s not enough.
Well, you can’t operate based on love and purpose being real. You don’t know then, what power it has to heal.
The thing is, it’s all a matter of scale. Love is meaningless on the scale of the universe, actually it is meaningless on the scale of everything larger than one person to another, but that doesn’t matter. It’s not meaningless for that person who cares or is cared about.
Is cosmic scale the only scale that is important? If an ant finds a bit of food, that event is only meaningful to that ant, and I may step on it just a second later. Does my looming foot take away the meaningfulness of that chunk of food for the ant? To me, it doesn’t.
If an ant were able to think of crushing feet (or incomprehensible disasters), ridiculously short lifespans, and every insect that may eat them… it probably wouldn’t care about that piece of food anymore, that’s true. That’s what happens to us humans. Happiness is possible when we keep to things on our own scale. Happiness is impossible on a larger scale, and it is important to realize this, but this impossibility doesn’t take away the meaning something can have on a smaller scale.
This too, is relativism. When you don’t believe in a higher being, importance of events is circumstance-based only. Absurd as that might be, there is a possibility of happiness in there. The meaning of life depends of the scale on which you are looking at things.
Good thought process there. 🙂
Meaning at the point of perception. Universal meaning only makes sense if there is a “point / level of perception” at that universal scale.
Personal perception of value does nothing for intrinsic actual value in events though. What would be required for events to have actual value in a temporally-bound universe…? I have my thoughts on that.
…all things…
If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing. Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known. So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.
(1 Corinthians 13:1-13 ESV)
Plainly, LIVING atheism is impossible… for the vast majority of atheists. If you haven’t read this yet, do & share why it’s not true. I shared it before – maybe not to you.
http://www.reasonablefaith.org/the-absurdity-of-life-without-god
This is a great article you hadn’t shared with me yet, and it highlights a lot of things I believe in.
I certainly believe we are purposeless, doomed, and without hope whatsoever. I am an ethical relativist, I don’t believe in right and wrong as fixed values. I also don’t believe that human life has intrinsic value. I could go on, basically all the things listed as “absurdities of atheism” are things I am painfully aware of.
I think I have told you before that I am somewhat jealous of religious people. They have a frame of reference, they have something to hold on to, they have hope. I can see the worth of that, and I think my life would be many, many times easier if I was able to be religious. Not to mention that it would be absolutely awesome if there would be an afterlife. (I mean this seriously. I would love for there to be something after death.)
But I believe in the absurdity, unhappy as it makes me. I don’t have the slightest speck of spiritual feeling; I simply don’t possess the ability to believe in (a) higher being(s). To me, being religious is a pleasant delusion that I -despite being schizophrenic- can’t seem to commit to. They hold it against atheists that they “pretend life has meaning” to survive, but to me religion is a pretense just the same.
Living atheism is possible. It’s just not very appealing.
There were a couple bits in the article that bugged me though.
“For if God does not exist, then natural selection dictates that the male of the species is the dominant and aggressive one.”
– This is unfounded and incorrect. Natural selection and evolution are very complicated processes, and every day more things are discovered about why certain behavior survives in us. The writer is obviously very knowledgable about philosophy, but not biology. I’m nothing close to an expert in the field myself, but even I can easily tell this statement wrong.
I think we are as we are because of the way we have evolved, because the way we are happened to be successful, inborn ethical feeling (in most people) and social behavior included. When we reach over the limits of our “human-ness”, leave the paths that are determined by genetics, surroundings, etcetera… and look at things on a larger scale, we falter and fail. It is the tragedy of our intelligence that we are capable of contemplating things that our own biology (brain included) can’t keep up with.
“Living atheism is possible. It’s just not very appealing.” – no, if you do commit to that you have NO happiness, hope & purpose from day to day, unless by leaping from the lower to the upper level in that imaginative building.
…unless you live on artificial happiness from drugs – which may be the case – and you should be pitied for that. In that worldview, death is to be aspired to I suppose – to end this ruthless, loveless, hopeless & purposeless fleeting existence.
Atheism isn’t “one up” on theism – since people are not intellectually honest about their destiny. They live the lie (typically) day after day after day – WILLINGLY IGNORANT of the realities that can be a heartbeat away.
Why does the knowledge you’re inevitably going to die, leaving nothing behind, have to keep you from enjoying your life? Everything dies.
Do animals stop hunting, eating, reproducing,… because they will die? No. They lack the intelligence to “not live in the moment”, to look forward and contemplate things yet to happen and things they can’t see. Humans are no more than animals, but with a tragic ability to “foretell” the future. This ability is what makes us one of earth’s most successful species, but it also makes for a pretty big existential crisis. We are ants trying to cope with the looming foot.
Believing in a higher being is a way of coping. Does death and disaster stay away because you believe you will go to heaven when it strikes? Nope. But does believing make you better at weathering through the misery? In many cases, it does. (If researched, it might just turn out that being spiritually inclined is an evolutionary successful trait, which would explain why people can have deep spiritual feelings even when they weren’t raised to be religious.)
“Someone with experience is never at the mercy of someone with an argument”. The statement has downsides, but your worldview isn’t more clinical, respectable or empirical. You have no hope beyond your “worldview box” – which is understandable. My “box” is bigger, but you don’t believe it exists.
Back to basics. I started journaling about answered prayer – otherwise we forget so quickly & it seems like maybe only 5 prayers get answered in a year. This morning I prayed & what I asked for genuinely happened within 2 seconds from finishing the prayer. We were in a hurry to leave – I prayed that the nanny would arrive and then she appeared at the gate just then. Ye, coincidence. This evening we were faced with a very challenging logistic issue. Our au pair lady, that helps with lifts for the kids mainly, mentioned she won’t be doing that from Friday. We don’t have family that can help. Big deal maybe for you, but I’m not keen on random people driving my kids around. We prayed & where this was a thing of weeks of stress the first time around, we found a perfect option within an hour from then – someone we know, but wasn’t an option before. These mean nothing to you, but if you can pray for things & your heavenly Father answers regularly enough – you’d notice too.
“…the male is the dominant & aggressive one…”
Do you realize how irrelevant this is? We’re evolving as the fleeting effect of a cosmic burp, without even the possibility of survival of our pathetic little minuscule DNA-song. Of what possible consequence is it who in the microscopic pac-man-living-moment we have is dominant? No, that comment is only explained, to me, by the biblical worldview – where we have irrational illusions of grandeur – in a word, pride.
This is what I mean with scale.
It is interesting to know where we come from.
It is interesting to understand what makes us act as we do.
Is it important or even interesting on any cosmic scale? Of Course Not.
But that’s not necessary for it to be important on our little, human scale.
To me, there is a certain pride in the biblical worldview as well. Do we need to be important on a cosmic scale to be interesting to ourselves? Do we need to have meaning to be worth studying?
What I mean to say is; can you not enjoy the sunshine without believing there is a god?
I’m an art historian, I study things that are absolutely inconsequential to 99 percent of the population and then some. Should I just quit my studies? I don’t think so, and not only because it is a “noble lie” that keeps me from killing myself. My studies are Actually Interesting, on the scale of humans. Their importance on any cosmic scale is of… well, no importance for their meaning and interest to me.
Scale. Mmmm. Well,
“To me, there is a certain pride in the biblical worldview as well. Do we need to be important on a cosmic scale to be interesting to ourselves?”
Interesting is just a concept if there is someone to be interested. Eschatology in science predicts that interest will stop. Also, I’m not “interested” in running on a wheel for my time-slot in the sunlight. It is beautiful, yes, but that’s a non sequitur it seems to me. Beauty, like interest is in the eye of the beholder – once the beholder ceases, beauty stops. This is meaningless. You should read Ecclesiastes if you haven’t really yet. Maybe it will resonate with you. Maybe you’ll think “this is what I’ve been saying!”. 🙂
These thoughts are not new. We need to be humble. Pride is super-foolish – on both worldviews I think.
Everything Is Meaningless
2 “Everything is meaningless,” says the Teacher, “completely meaningless!”
3 What do people get for all their hard work under the sun? 4 Generations come and generations go, but the earth never changes. 5 The sun rises and the sun sets, then hurries around to rise again. 6 The wind blows south, and then turns north. Around and around it goes, blowing in circles. 7 Rivers run into the sea, but the sea is never full. Then the water returns again to the rivers and flows out again to the sea. 8 Everything is wearisome beyond description. No matter how much we see, we are never satisfied. No matter how much we hear, we are not content.
9 History merely repeats itself. It has all been done before. Nothing under the sun is truly new. 10 Sometimes people say, “Here is something new!” But actually it is old; nothing is ever truly new. 11 We don’t remember what happened in the past, and in future generations, no one will remember what we are doing now.
The Teacher Speaks: The Futility of Wisdom
12 I, the Teacher, was king of Israel, and I lived in Jerusalem. 13 I devoted myself to search for understanding and to explore by wisdom everything being done under heaven. I soon discovered that God has dealt a tragic existence to the human race. 14 I observed everything going on under the sun, and really, it is all meaningless—like chasing the wind.
15 What is wrong cannot be made right.
What is missing cannot be recovered.
16 I said to myself, “Look, I am wiser than any of the kings who ruled in Jerusalem before me. I have greater wisdom and knowledge than any of them.” 17 So I set out to learn everything from wisdom to madness and folly. But I learned firsthand that pursuing all this is like chasing the wind.
18 The greater my wisdom, the greater my grief.
To increase knowledge only increases sorrow.
That is undeniably beautiful.
My happenstance-found-foreign-friend, worlds apart – in worldview and distance … is there purpose in our cyber encounter?
I cried for you today – in traffic.
What does that mean? …silence…
…
I want to buy you a ‘CD’ on iTunes. Is your blog gravatar email ok for that? Assume you have one there.
…so, still Ecclesiastes fits in the biblical worldview. Oddly so, but it does.
I do wonder how… (seriously, I’m curious now.)
Read it.
Some comments:
Many Christian readers are troubled by Ecclesiastes. From the very beginning, where it declares that everything is meaningless (1:2), it seems unashamedly pessimistic and negative on life. Some wonder why this book is in the Bible. But if we carefully examine its background and message, we discover that Ecclesiastes confronts us and drives us to God in a way that few books do.
Message and Purpose
Christian readers, after they have shaken off the initial shock of reading Ecclesiastes, have often described it as a defense of the faith or even an evangelistic work. Ecclesiastes shows that many of the pursuits of life, including wealth, education, and power, do not really fulfill. In that way Ecclesiastes shows that life without God is meaningless and drives the reader to faith.
Many readers have pointed out how much stark skepticism is in Ecclesiastes. If Ecclesiastes is an apologetic work, it is surely unlike any other defense of the faith ever written. But the defensive and evangelistic purpose of Ecclesiastes is clearer if one takes into account its original audience. A careful study of the text demonstrates conclusively that its first readers were not “ordinary” people but the wealthy, the powerful, and those who had access to the royal court. Again and again it deals with the study of wisdom (which the average person did not have time to do), the value of wealth, and the problems involved in being in the king’s court. These things did not apply as issues in the lives of most people.
Addressed to the intellectual and political elite of Israel, the book’s “pessimism” makes sense. It was speaking to the very people who were most likely to build their lives on success, wealth, power, and an intellectual reputation. Ecclesiastes repeatedly points out the futility of such a way of life and urges the readers to face their need for God. In that sense Ecclesiastes is indeed evangelistic and in fact can be read profitably by anyone.
Ecclesiastes should not be called pessimistic or cynical, but it is brutally realistic. In particular Ecclesiastes makes the reader confront the full and dreadful significance of death. Most people, whether or not they are religious, refuse to face what death really is: a calamity that nullifies the achievements of human life. Ecclesiastes strips away the myths we use to shield ourselves from this stark fact.
In pointing out the dreadfulness of death, Ecclesiastes helps us see how profound is our need for resurrection. More simply, Ecclesiastes drives us to Christ. The New Testament shares this perspective; death is not a friend or even a doorway but a terrible enemy. It will be, however, a conquered enemy (1 Cor 15:26, 54–55; Rev 20:14).
Structure
To the modern reader, Ecclesiastes at first appears to have no structure at all. The book does not follow modern standards of setting topics in a hierarchy. But a careful reading shows that Ecclesiastes carefully moves among a group of selected subjects. These include wealth, politics, wisdom, death, and aging. As the book moves to and fro among these and other topics, a complete statement gradually emerges.
Thank you, that’s very interesting…
So Ecclesiastes is in essence the same type of “defense of faith” as the article you let me read; accentuating the need for God and faith by showing the pointlessness of an existence without it.
It’s certainly a beautiful text…
This is obviously worldview-linked. You define life & purpose as X. You place event & effect in a spiritual-void context. We won’t get to the same conclusions.
Yes, that I think is a good way to put it.